I always wonder when people rant about situations with so much detail, if anyone reading the rant recognizes themselves in the post.

Even if the poster was anonymous, so you can't figure out their screen name, you still hear everything that poster thought about you and what the rest of the imamother community thinks about your actions etc etc.

For example, someone posts, I can't stand my neighbor. She does abc and xyz and is really awful etc. etc.

And as you read the details you think "Thats" what my neighbor thinks of me..

People are more alike than different. (Just google on someone you think has a really unusual name and see how rare that name isn’t.) So unless the poster is giving meticulous detail about someone really unusual ( a six foot six seventy-five-year-old black transgender giyoret from Vanuatu with a doctorate in fluid physics who spent three years in Antarctica studying the way penguins propel themselves through the water and then went on to have a one-woman exhibition in the Tate Gallery of her paintings of penguin families), chances are that many dozens of people will fit the description.

And really smart posters change a few details here and there to disguise the person, so if you believe you recognize yourself, you probably don’t.

... a six foot six seventy-five-year-old black transgender giyoret from Vanuatu with a doctorate in fluid physics who spent three years in Antarctica studying the way penguins propel themselves through the water and then went on to have a one-woman exhibition in the Tate Gallery of her paintings of penguin families)....

So unless the poster is giving meticulous detail about someone really unusual ( a six foot six seventy-five-year-old black transgender giyoret from Vanuatu with a doctorate in fluid physics who spent three years in Antarctica studying the way penguins propel themselves through the water and then went on to have a one-woman exhibition in the Tate Gallery of her paintings of penguin families), chances are that many dozens of people will fit the description.

Using “African American” as a euphemism for black is just dumb. A person of African descent who grew up in Europe or Asia is not an African American any more than a person of Italian descent who grew up in Ireland is an Italian American. Our hypothetical giyoret above is very clearly not African American. She is a Vanuatuan of African descent.

A true African American is my coworker, born and educated in Nigeria, who immigrated to the US and is now a naturalized US citizen.

I may be politically incorrect but I don’t call Americans of African descent African American if they don’t have any living relatives who were born in Africa. I don’t call myself Lithuanian American, either.